Monthly Archives: September 2014

“The liberals have tried to hide their philosophy behind our words. When they say ‘opportunity,’ they mean subsidies. When they say ‘closing the deficit,’ they mean raising taxes. When they say ‘strong defense,’ they mean cut defense spending — no wonder their favorite machine is the snowblower.” – Ronald Reagan

COMMENTARY BY

Stephen Moore, who formerly wrote on the economy and public policy for The Wall Street Journal, is chief economist at The Heritage Foundation.Read his research.

My seventh-grade son recently wrote a U.S. History paper extolling the virtues of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “It ended the Great Depression,” he wrote with great certainty. He’s only 12 and parroting what the history texts and his teachers told him.

That’s his excuse. What’s Ken Burns’?

Mr. Burns’ docudrama on the Roosevelts—for those who weren’t bored to tears—repeats nearly all the worn-out fairy tales of the FDR presidency, including what I call the most enduring myth of the 20th century, which is that FDR’s avalanche of alphabet-soup government programs ended the Great Depression. Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on such lies?

Ask nearly anyone over the age of 80, and they will say that FDR cared about the working man and “gave the country hope,” a point that Mr. Burns emphasizes. Roosevelt exuded empathy, which isn’t a bad thing—remember Bill Clinton’s memorable line “I feel your pain”?—but caring doesn’t create jobs or lift gross domestic product.

Nor does spending government money revive growth, despite the theories put into practice by the then-dean of all economists, John Maynard Keynes. Any objective analysis of these facts can lead to no other conclusion. U.S. unemployment averaged a rate of 18 percent during Roosevelt’s first eight years in office. In the decade of the 1930s, U.S. industrial production and national income fell by about almost one-third. In 1940, after year eight years of the New Deal, unemployment was still averaged a god-awful 14 percent.

Think of it this way. The unemployment rate was more than twice as high eight years into the New Deal than it is today, and American workers now are angry as hornets. Imagine, if jobs were twice as scarce today, the pitchforked revolt that would be going on. This is success?

Almost everything FDR did to jump-start growth retarded it. The rise in the minimum wage kept unemployment intolerably high. (Are you listening, Nancy Pelosi?) Roosevelt’s work programs like the Works Progress Administration, National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration were so bureaucratic as to have minimal impact on jobs. Raising tax rates to nearly 80 percent on the rich stalled the economy. Social Security is and always was from the start a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme that will eventually sink into bankruptcy unless reformed.

The cruel irony of the New Deal is that the liberals’ honorable intentions to help the poor and the unemployed caused more human suffering than any other set of ideas in the past century.

The most alarming story of economic ignorance surrounding this New Deal era was the tax increases while the economy was faltering. According to economist Burt Folsom, FDR signed one of the most financially devastating taxes: “On April 27, 1942, he signed an executive order taxing all personal income above $25,000 [rich back then] at 100 percent. Congress balked at that idea and later lowered it to 90 percent at the top level.” The New Dealers completely ignored the lessons of the 1920s tax cuts, which just a decade before had unfurled an age of super-growth.

Then there was the spending and debt barrage. Federal spending catapulted from $4.65 billion in 1933 to nearly $13.7 billion in 1941. This tripling of the federal budget in just eight years came at a time of almost no inflation (just 13.1 percent cumulative during that period). Budget surpluses during the prosperous Coolidge years became ever-larger deficits under FDR’s fiscal reign. During his first term, more than half the federal budget on average came from borrowed money.

The cruel irony of the New Deal is that the liberals’ honorable intentions to help the poor and the unemployed caused more human suffering than any other set of ideas in the past century.

What is maddening is that thanks to this historical fabrication of FDR’s presidency, dutifully repeated by Mr. Burns, we have repeated the mistakes again and again. Had the history books been properly written, it’s quite possible we would never had to endure the catastrophic failure of Obamanomics and the “stimulus plans” that only stimulated debt. The entire rationale for the Obama economic plan in 2009 was to re-create new New Deal.

Doubly amazing is that at this very moment, the left is writing another fabricated history — of the years we have just lived through. The history books are already painting Obama policies as the just-in-time emergency policies that prevented a Second Great Depression. I wonder if 80 years from now, the American people will be as gullible as they are today in believing, as my 12-year-old does, that FDR was an economic savior.

Join us on Thursday night, October 2, 2014 for an engaging and interactive evening of great information and stories of success in recovering the potential and power of the people.

In addition – bring your Blue Books and come ready for a review of the ballot initiatives with House District 56 Representative Kevin Priola.

Kevin is sharing his time amidst running for re-election for HD56.

Kevin is endorsed by an impressive team, including, Hank Brown, Bill Armstrong, Wayne Allard and Bill Owens as well as Bob Sakata, Dick McLean and Dave and Susan Petrocco.

Kevin has an “A” Rating with the National Rifle Association as well as North Metro Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Businesses. He has a 92% rating with The American Conservative Union.

Steve Laffey will be our featured presenter and a source for “insightful” and “insider” perspectives on key issues . . . like the national budget, our political process and how we can take practical actions in supporting and defending the values and the ideals of our founding fathers.

Steve’s understanding of the problems with “big” government and business, equips him with the insights needed to “solve the problem”. His movie “Fixing America” asked regular Americans for their ideas on how to fix America’s problems.

Steve was a Republican Candidate for the House Congressional District 4 in 2014. He was Mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island – leading the city from the verge of bankruptcy to financial stability and sustainability.

The Athenians knew it. Jefferson knew it. Somehow we have forgotten: Civic devotion, instilled at school, is essential to a good society.

By DONALD KAGANAdapted from remarks by Yale University historian and professor emeritus Donald Kagan at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., Sept. 18, a talk based in part on a lecture he delivered at Yale on Nov. 4, 2001:

What is an education for? It is a question seldom investigated thoroughly. The ancient philosophers had little doubt: They lived in a city-state whose success and very existence depended on the willingness of citizens to overcome the human tendency to seek their individual, self-interested goals and to make the sacrifices needed for the community’s well-being. Their idea of education, therefore, was moral and civic, not merely instrumental. They reasoned that if a state or community is to be good, its citizens must be good, so they aimed at an education that would produce virtuous people and good citizens.

Some two thousand years later, from the 16th through the 18th centuries, a different group of philosophers in Italy, England and France introduced a powerful new idea. Their world was dominated by ambitious princes and kings who were rapidly asserting ever greater authority over the lives of their people and trampling on the traditional expectations of individuals and communities. In the philosophers’ view, every human being was naturally endowed with three essential rights: to defend his life, liberty and lawfully acquired property.

The responsibility of the state, therefore, was limited and largely negative: to protect the people from external enemies and not to interfere with the rights of individual citizens. Suspicious of the claims of church and state to inculcate virtue as mere devices to serve the selfish interests of their rulers, most philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that moral and civic instruction was not the business of the state.

Among our country’s founders, none was a more devoted son of the Enlightenment than Thomas Jefferson, yet as he considered the needs of the new democratic republic he had helped to establish, he came to very different conclusions. Like the ancient philosophers, Jefferson regarded education as essential to the establishment and maintenance of a good polity— Plato, in “The Republic,” spends many pages on the nature of the citizens’ education, as does Aristotle in “Politics.” Jefferson regarded a proper educational system as so important that in the epitaph he wrote for himself, he did not mention that he had twice been elected president of the United States but proudly recorded that he was the “Father of the University of Virginia.”

Jefferson was convinced that there needed to be an education for all citizens if they and their new kind of popular government were to flourish. He understood that schools must provide “to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; to enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts, and accounts, in writing.”

For Jefferson, though, the most important goals of education were civic and moral. In his “Preamble to the 1779 Virginia Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” he addresses the need for all students to have a political education through the study of the “forms of government,” political history and foreign affairs. This was not meant to be a “value free” exercise; on the contrary, its purpose was to communicate the special virtues of republican representative democracy, the dangers that threatened it, and the responsibility of its citizens to esteem and protect it. This education was to be a common experience for all citizens, rich and poor, for every one of them had natural rights and powers, and every one had to understand and esteem the institutions, laws and traditions of his country if it was to succeed.

It is striking to notice the similarity between Jefferson’s ideas and those of a leader of the last great democracy prior to Jefferson’s fledgling democracy. In 431 B.C., Pericles of Athens described the character of the great democratic society he wished for his community: A city “governed by the many, not the few,” where in the “matter of public honors each man is preferred not on the basis of his class but of his good reputation and merit. No one, moreover, if he has it in him to do some good for the city, is barred because of poverty or humble origins.”

Both great democratic leaders knew that democracy, properly understood, requires a careful balance between the political and constitutional rights of the individual, where absolute equality is the only acceptable principle, and the other aspects of life, where equality of opportunity and reward on the basis of merit are appropriate. They also agreed on the need for individuals to limit their desires and even to curtail their own rights, when necessary, to make sacrifices in the service of the community without whose protection those rights could not exist. In short, democracy and patriotism were inseparable.

These values have not disappeared, but in our own time they have been severely challenged. With the shock of the 9/11 terror attacks, most Americans reacted by clearly and powerfully supporting their government’s determination to use military force to stop such attacks and to prevent future ones. Most Americans also expressed a new unity, an explicit patriotism and love of their country not seen among us for a very long time.

That is not what we saw and heard from the faculties on most elite campuses in the country, and certainly not from the overwhelming majority of people designated as “intellectuals” who spoke up in public. They offered any and all explanations, so long as they indicated that the attackers were really victims, that the fault really rested with the United States.

As most of us have come to know too well, the terrorists of al Qaeda and other jihadists regard America as “the great Satan” and hate the U.S. not only because its power stands in the way of the achievement of their Islamist vision, but also because its free, open, democratic, tolerant, liberal and prosperous society is a powerful competitor for the allegiance of millions of Muslims around the world. No change of American policy, no retreat from the world, no repentance or increase of modesty can change these things.

Yet many members of the intelligentsia decried the outburst of patriotism that greeted the new assault on America. The critics were exemplified by author Katha Pollitt, who wrote in the Oct. 1, 2001, edition of the Nation about her daughter wanting to fly the American flag outside their window after 9/11. “Definitely not,” Ms. Pollitt replied. “The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.”

Such ideas still have a wide currency, reflecting a serious flaw in American education that should especially concern those of us who take some part in it. The encouragement of patriotism is no longer a part of our public educational system, and the cost of that omission has made itself felt. This would have alarmed and dismayed the founders of our country.

Jefferson meant American education to produce a necessary patriotism. Democracy—of all political systems, because it depends on the participation of its citizens in their own government and because it depends on their own free will to risk their lives in its defense—stands in the greatest need of an education that produces patriotism.

I recognize that I have said something shocking. The past half-century has seen a sharp turn away from what had been traditional attitudes toward the purposes and functions of education. Our schools have retreated from the idea of moral education, except for some attempts at what is called “values clarification,” which is generally a cloak for moral relativism verging on nihilism of the sort that asserts that whatever feels good is good.

Even more vigorously have the schools fled from the idea of encouraging patriotism. In the intellectual climate of our time, the very suggestion brings contemptuous sneers or outrage, depending on the listener’s mood. There is no end of quoting Samuel Johnson’s famous remark that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” but no recollection of Boswell’s explanation that Johnson “did not mean a real and generous love for our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.”

Many have been the attacks on patriotism for intolerance, arrogance and bellicosity, but that is to equate it with its bloated distortion, chauvinism. My favorite dictionary defines the latter as “militant and boastful devotion to and glorification of one’s country,” but defines a patriot as “one who loves, supports, and defends his country.”

That does not require us to denigrate or attack any other country, nor does it require us to admire our own uncritically. But just as an individual must have an appropriate love of himself if he is to perform well, an appropriate love of his family if he and it are to prosper, so, too, must he love his country if it is to survive. Neither family nor nation can flourish without love, support and defense, so that an individual who has benefited from those institutions not only serves his self-interest but also has a moral responsibility to give them his support.

Thus are assaults on patriotism failures of character. They are made by privileged people who enjoy the full benefits offered by the country they deride and detest, but they lack the basic decency to pay it the allegiance and respect that honor demands. But honor, of course, is also an object of their derision.

Every country requires a high degree of cooperation and unity among its citizens if it is to achieve the internal harmony that every good society requires. Most countries have relied on the common ancestry and traditions of their people as the basis of their unity, but the United States can rely on no such commonality. We are an enormously diverse and varied people, almost all immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. The great strengths provided by this diversity are matched by great dangers. We are always vulnerable to divisions among us that can be exploited to set one group against another and destroy the unity and harmony that have allowed us to flourish.

We live in a time when civic devotion has been undermined and national unity is under attack. The idea of a common American culture, enriched by the diverse elements that compose it but available equally to all, is under assault, and attempts are made to replace it with narrower and politically divisive programs that are certain to set one group of Americans against another.

The answer to these problems and our only hope for the future must lie in education, which philosophers have rightly put at the center of the consideration of justice and the good society. We look to education to solve the pressing current problems of our economic and technological competition with other nations, but we must not neglect the inescapable political, and ethical, effects of education.

We in the academic community have too often engaged in miseducation. If we encourage separatism, we will get separation and the terrible conflict in society it will bring. If we encourage rampant individualism to trample on the need for a community and common citizenship, if we ignore civic education, the forging of a single people, the building of a legitimate patriotism, we will have selfish individuals, heedless of the needs of others, the war of all against all, the reluctance to work toward the common good and to defend our country when defense is needed.

The civic sense that America needs can come only from a common educational effort. In telling the story of the American political experience, we must insist on the honest search for truth; we must permit no comfortable self-deception or evasion, no seeking of scapegoats. The story of this country’s vision of a free, democratic republic and of its struggle to achieve it need not fear the most thorough examination and can proudly stand comparison with that of any other land.

In the long and deadly battle against those who hate Western ideals, and hate America in particular, we must be powerfully armed, morally as well as materially. To sustain us through the worst times we need courage and unity, and these must rest on a justified and informed patriotism.

By George, I think she’s got it — check out this hilarious video of a recovering liberal, now conservative, stating her Top Ten Reasons why she’s no longer a Democrat. One thing is for certain, the younger generation in America is starting to realize that hopey changey thing ain’t working for them and their future. I guarantee you’ll bust a laugh with this one. Hat tip to @ellysa_maye and her exceptional use of social media to make her point.

Could someone please get Sen. Mark Udall a calendar. It’s 2014, not 1972 — the year the Supreme Court of the United States prevented states from forbidding abortion. Even a highly unlikely court reversal of Roe v. Wade would have no direct effect on his constituents. Colorado had abortion on demand before Roe v. Wade, Udall knows it, and the state has only become more liberal on reproductive social issues in the ensuing 42 years.

+ caption

Udall’s daily fear mongering has become an obvious ploy to distract voters from the real issues in the U.S. Senate. A typical daily news release from his campaign Friday mentioned “birth control” 14 times. If he’s not fabricating a threat to contraception, he’s sending news releases that pretend abortion rights are in play.

Here’s why. A New York Times/CBS poll released Tuesday does not bode well for Udall, so it makes sense he wants to dwell on issues from the past. Among all likely voters, 45 percent plan to vote for Republican congressional candidates. Independents, who are disproportionately influential in Colorado, are going for Republicans by a 10 percent spread. Democrats hold only a 1 percent margin of favor among women.

Another damning poll, released by Quinnipiac University on Thursday, found Udall 8 points behind his opponent, U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner.

The Times/CBS poll found Americans trust Republicans by significant margins on topics of foreign policy, the economy and protection from terror. If Udall wants to assuage those concerns, he needs to talk about them.

Here’s the problem. He has voted with President Barack Obama 99 percent of the time and has no more a clue how to protect us from terrorists than the president has. Just like Obama, Udall doesn’t think we have an urgent problem. When he suggested we not “be impulsive” in our response to terror, Udall fabricated opinions for two beheaded American journalists and allocated their support to his position. Of course, the terror victims cannot possibly counter what the senator said.

“Steve Sotloff and James Foley would tell us, don’t be impulsive,” Udall said during a recent debate in Grand Junction with Gardner. “Horrible and barbarous as those executions were, don’t be impulsive, come up with a plan to knock ISIL back.”

We won’t likewise assume knowledge of Sotloff’s and Foley’s geopolitical philosophies, but it’s fair to say a swift response to ISIS would have given them a better shot at survival. After his statement evoked public outrage, Udall apologized.

Asked about ISIS on Sept. 9, Udall said, “I don’t take ISIL as an immediate threat to the homeland … .?” He sounded identical to Obama.

On nearly all economic issues, Obama has enjoyed Udall’s impassioned support. The senator continues to believe the president’s signature Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act could be part of the country’s economic salvation. He says he would vote for it again.

Udall can’t even discuss legitimate, time-relevant gender issues — such as equal pay for equal work. That’s because in 2013, Udall paid full-time women on his staff an average of $58,000. The senator’s male employees averaged $67,300 — almost $10,000 more than their female colleagues. Gardner’s full-time female employees earn an average of $10,000 more than their male counterparts.

The New York Times believes President Obama has hurt Democrats on all relevant 21st century issues involving terror, the economy and foreign policy. He has had no greater ally than Sen. Udall. That’s why the senator wants to discuss issues we grappled with and resolved in the 1970s.

Read more at http://gazette.com/editorial-why-udall-talks-birth-control-so-much/article/1537935#dtsYtrEO0bcxccjS.99

The Reagan Club meets on the second Thursday of every month at CB & Potts, 1257 W 120th Avenue, Westminster, CO, 80234 from 6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. with doors open at 6:00 p.m. Enter via CB & Potts main entrance and head to the back meeting room. Food and beverages are available from CB & Potts.
We feature different programs and speakers as we honor the 40th President.
The Reagan Club of Colorado seeks to promote the Constitution, smaller government, lower taxes, personal freedom, helping candidates, and educating the public about one of our greatest presidents, Ronald Wilson Reagan.